Development of magnetic-responsive liquid crystals (LCs) is of both fundamental and practical importance since it not only represents an ideal system in condensed matter that allows exploration of phase complexity in a single sample as the external field changes, but it also opens the way towards various applications that benefit from the instantaneous and contactless nature of magnetic interactions.
Conventional liquid crystals (LCs) are mostly insensitive to magnetic fields. Limited by the low magnetic susceptibility of their components, most studies on previous liquid crystals focus only on the phase behavior of LCs under magnetic fields. It is believed the use of magnetically tunable liquid crystals for practical applications, such as optical switching, has never been demonstrated.